Amazon and Microsoft top Gartner's IaaS Magic Quadrant

Summary:Gartner’s 2014 Magic Quadrant on IaaS, which ranks the top 15 players in the Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market, reaffirmed Amazon Web Services' (AWS) dominance in the IaaS space by once again ranking it number one in the 'Leaders' quadrant, reports Krishan Sharma.

Microsoft’s Azure Cloud was elevated to a secondary 'Leaders' status, up from its 'Visionary' status last year. While Azure is still a distant second to AWS in terms of market share, it is far ahead of its other competitors.

Gartner on AWS: “It is the overwhelming market share leader, with more than five times the cloud IaaS compute capacity in use than the aggregate total of the other 14 providers in this Magic Quadrant.”

In a detailed 50-page report, Gartner heaped praise on AWS, highlighting its diverse customer base, aggressive pricing strategy, and the broadest range of use-cases, including enterprise and mission-critical applications.

“It has the richest array of IaaS features and PaaS-like capabilities, and continues to rapidly expand its service offerings. It is the provider most commonly chosen for strategic adoption.”

While AWS, as an early mover, has several years of competitive advantage, it is expected to face significant competition from Microsoft in the traditional business market and from Google in the cloud-native market.

According to the report, Microsoft’s Azure cloud service is already making significant inroads despite the fact that it only launched the IaaS component of its business into general availability a little over a year ago.

Image courtesy of Gartner

Rackspace on the other hand took a step backwards, relegated to 'Niche' status.

Gartner's take on Microsoft Azure: “Its vision is global, and it is aggressively expanding into multiple international markets.”

VMware, Fujitsu, HP, Dimension Data, Virtustream, Joyent and GoGrid fall in the bottom quadrant. In 2013 Gartner pegged Rackspace at equal footing with Microsoft in the 'Visionary' league, but the former's developer-centric offering, lack of big business appeal, and unremarkable value proposition gave Gartner reason to downgrade the company.

Computer Science Corp (CSC) fell out of the 'Leader' quadrant and moved down into the busy Visionaries quadrant to join Google, IBM/SoftLayer, CenturyLink and Verizon Terremark.

According to Gartner, these five providers are in the middle of reinventing themselves and will most likely battle it out for the number three spot in the market.